The last CIV Summit took place in Accra, capital of Ghana. First of all, be in Africa was amazing! That would be enough! However, we also had some leaders of our Organization with us: Mark Hanlon (Senior VP of USA), Chuck McGinty (IPG Senior Director) and Mark Yeadon (Senior VP of International Program).
It was a casual but very important meeting with the CIV Ministry. We would like to share some of that experience with you.
What do our leaders think about CIV?
See below some insights...
“In order to understand CIV, we must remember that there are things that the projects do that won’t be successful without a CIV intervention. That would be like wasting resources… With CIV activities the resources applied through the Child Support can be leveraged and the project will accomplish its objectives. CIV interventions must remove obstacles!” (Mark Hanlon)
“We cannot grow if we continue doing things the same way as we do today. Everything is too manual, complex, amateur and immature. We had been reactive instead of proactive. Planning avoids reactivity. We need to plan! There comes the importance of the STRATEGY” (Regina Hopewell)
“Compassion has grown 10 times in the last 10 years. We must run to be able to do what we must do. It’s necessary to work hard and have a clear objective and then, make a huge endeavor to keep going in the direction defined. With clear objectives it’s easier to say NO to things that have nothing to do with our objectives, but still it’s needed to work hard, incessantly, to keep going into what was defined as objective.” (Mark Yeadon)
There are donors who ‘test’ before giving large donations to Compassion. They start with small interventions and then, if they feel safe, give major donations. (Mark Hanlon)
Before, the priority was proposal writing. Actually, project management and implementation management are priorities. (Regina Hopewell)
Future State of CIV
We discussed in an activity a
definition of what is CIV and started to design a prototype model to be tested in the future. We also tried to identify the “big rocks” of a future state. We worked in small groups and each one analyzed a Tier from a prototype model proposed and well presented by Regina Hopewell. At the end, each group presented their suggestions/recommendations and we hope to have some more
news about this prototype once the CIV Cabinet releases more information. This new prototype will be tested in one country of each region next fiscal year. The general opinion is that a change is needed and it seems that with Beyond Compass, our ministry will also go through a big change in a near future. I invite you to pray for this process and participate giving your opinion. Think about the questions below and leave a comment with your answer:
- If we need to work to reach the neediest within our reach, what would be the impact for CIV?
- We want to finish well. This means more focus on the adolescents skills. What CIV can do to focus on adolescents?
- Addressing the wider context of the child also means more CIV funds. How could we address the wider context of our children?
Those were questions that we were challenged to think about during the Summit. Join us and leave your answers below!
We know that there are (many) CIV cases with
success much greater than what has been described in the final reports. This is
due many factors, but the time is surely one important factor: many reports are
written and some impacts are known just sometime later. One example: some days
ago we knew about a Peru initiative where some youngsters received orientation
and resources to study in preparation courses to enter college. That CIV was
known as Pre-LDP. They reported that some of the participants had entered the
university. Sometime later, more youngsters made it and entered college. These
are long term results, beyond the report. Do you know something like that? Some
CIV with impacts that are not in the report? Share!
Not all of you have
submitted your plans of the “Maximum Standard House” according to the Section
6.14, Standard 5.1 of the PFM 2.0. The Global Compliance Date was 31-Dec-2011.
The lack of the “Standard House” approved would imply on some difficulties in
case your country needs approval of proposals including constructions of houses
for beneficiaries in a disaster event or even most at risk within their
communities. I’ve heard some doubts about this process, so here goes some comon question and the answers:
Maybe we
got surprised seeing a new version of the PFM. The trainings of the 2.0 version
were finished a couple of months ago and new changes were incorporated. Despite
these new changes we believe a training event will not be necessary, specially
related to the CIV section. The changes for our section were, in general, in 4
main aspects:
Congratulations to all Countries that submitted their 3 Year CIV Strategic plans. Special thanks to Mexico that worked well using the forms sent by GMC and submitted the plan on time!
